How About A 9-day Week -- 6 Work Days, 3 Rest Days?

Other Views

May 31, 2000|By Andrew J. Glass, Cox News Service

WASHINGTON -- The Bible tells us that God labored for six days of creation and rested on the seventh. Historians tell us the ancient Jews took the idea of the week from the Babylonians, who lived on the site of modern-day Iraq.

Unlike other measures of time, such as the day and the year, the week has no fixed rationale in the heavens. A ``week'' could just as well be eight days, as the Romans once had it. (They switched back to seven in 321 A.D. under Emperor Constantine.)

The World Future Society, which a decade ago foretold the rise of the Internet, recently invited folks to e-mail along far-reaching ideas on how to improve our lives. Proposals deemed of wide interest are being posted online.

That's how a proposed nine-day week made the cut on the society's new ``social innovation forum.''

Under such a scheme, writes author Harold Howe II, ``our economy would become more efficient, our leisure time more rewarding, our schools and colleges less crowded, our religious activities more meaningful, and our family lives more successful for both children and adults.''

Howe, who served as U.S. commissioner of education under President Lyndon Johnson, found an unpublished, 80-page Ford Foundation research paper from 1976 that fosters the concept. It was written by Carlos Varsavsky, an Argentine-born Harvard astrophysicist who died in 1983.

Under Varsavsky's plan, all of us would join one of three ``cadres.'' At any given time, two cadres would be on the job (or in school) while the third would be on vacation. Each ``week'' would consist of six work days and three rest days.

Varsavsky thought the concept would be particularly useful to part-time workers and seniors gearing down toward retirement. They could elect to work one of the three-day segments while taking the other six days off.

For efficiency and convenience, families and small-sized work groups could arrange to join the same ``A,'' "B'' or ``C'' triad. Should the need arise, they could also move from one to another.

Because service facilities would run at full-bore every day, the need to take time off from work to do chores would ease. Cars could be fixed during any one of the three rotating three-day ``weekends.'' Stores would also remain open every day except, perhaps, for five annual across-the-board holidays, such as Christmas, that would be exempt from an annual 40-week cycle.

Traffic jams would be eased as well, and parking spaces would be more available -- because at any one time one-third of the drivers would be home or headed for the hills.

For religious-minded people, there would be, in a sense, three ``Sundays'' a week. To be sure, church attendance on any one of those ``Sundays'' would drop by some two-thirds. But, Howe argues, the added ``ease of communication and opportunities for depth and intimacy in worship would be much enhanced.''

A need to ``think outside the box'' has become the current mantra in many Fortune 500 companies. Still, when new ideas challenge tradition, the status quo often prevails.

So will a nine-day week ever come to pass?

It's unlikely. But it wasn't so long ago that visionaries doubted that we would ever walk in space.